. The north-western provinces of India : their history, ethnology, and administration . uki. Of his city we aretold that it contained two thousand krores of serpent inhabi-tants, and the wives of all those serpents were of consummatebeauty ; and the city contained more jewels than any personin the world has ever seen, and there was a lake there whichcontained the waters of life and in which all the serpentsused to bathe. Thence led by Agni, the fire god, theAryas continued their conquest as far as the banks of theGandak, which divides the Province from Bengal. It was in the course of this late
. The north-western provinces of India : their history, ethnology, and administration . uki. Of his city we aretold that it contained two thousand krores of serpent inhabi-tants, and the wives of all those serpents were of consummatebeauty ; and the city contained more jewels than any personin the world has ever seen, and there was a lake there whichcontained the waters of life and in which all the serpentsused to bathe. Thence led by Agni, the fire god, theAryas continued their conquest as far as the banks of theGandak, which divides the Province from Bengal. It was in the course of this later migration that theyencountered the second race which had occupied the countryprior to their arrival. These are collectively known asDasyu, and between them and the Aryas we are told thatthere raged continual war. No terms are too vile to describethese people as we know them from Aryan literature. Theywere dark of skin, low-statured, treacherous, foul in manners,eaters of raw flesh, an abomination to the new-comers, andthis was probably the basis of much of the early stories of 196. THE PEOPLE : THEIR ETHNOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY cannibalism. At the same time there are indications thattliey had acquired a certain degree of culture. The commontheory represents these Dasyus as finally reduced to theposition of helots or serfs of the new-comers. But laterevidence, mainly based on anthropometry, indicates thatthey must have been gradually absorbed among their foreignconquerors; that the numbers of the Aryan colonists werenever large, and that from the union of the white, the yellow,and the black men, arose the modern people of northernIndia. Much speculation has been devoted to working out theethnical affinities of these black people ^—whether they wereautochthonous or immigrants, and if immigrants from whatdirection they reached Indian soil, and whether they wereone or a combination of several distinct races. By one, and the current theory, they consisted at least oftwo stocks—the
Size: 1405px × 1779px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthorcrookewi, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookyear1897
